It's Okay to Expect a Miracle

The Bible is full of them and they are still happening today. Here is a fascinating Christianity Today interview with New Testament Scholar Craig Keener. Enjoy!

"Craig Keener has the brain of a scholar and the hands of an activist. The New Testament professor at Asbury Theological Seminary has authored 15 books, 70 journal articles, and more than 100 articles for religious and general interest publications. He and his wife, Médine Moussounga Keener, are deeply involved in ethnic reconciliation ministry.

In his New Testament commentaries, Keener has investigated biblical miracles. But his newest volume—Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (Baker Academic)—focuses on contemporary miracle accounts, citing hundreds of recent occurrences.

Keener is ordained in a historic African American church and served as an associate minister before moving to Asbury's campus in Wilmore, Kentucky. Christianity Today senior writer Tim Stafford interviewed Keener this fall.

Miracles are an unusual subject for a New Testament scholar. What led you to it?

I was going to write a footnote in my commentary on Acts, and was dealing with questions of historical reliability. Many scholars dismiss miracle stories as not historically plausible, arguing that they arose as legendary accretions.

I was familiar with [contemporary] reports of miracles taking place. There must be thousands of such reports. It was inconceivable to me that people would say eyewitnesses can't claim to have seen such things.

What do you want to accomplish with this book?

Primarily, to challenge scholars who dismiss miracles in the Gospels as legends and not historically plausible. Eyewitnesses say these kinds of things all the time. I also want to challenge the bias that says these things can't be supernatural. I believe God does miracles, and I don't see why we scholars are not allowed to talk about it.

You're trying to break open the naturalistic tradition of writing history that scholars have followed for centuries.

I understand the historical paradigms within which we work, and I'm able to work within those by bracketing out certain questions. But I wonder who made up the rule that we have to bracket out those questions, and why we are obligated to follow such rules. The way the discipline of historiography has been defined, such questions get punted to philosophy or theology.

How is the world today different from philosopher David Hume's world, or theologian Rudolf Bultmann's, who said that a modern man who turns on an electric light can't possibly believe in a miracle?

In Hume's day, nobody he knew had experienced a miracle. But there were miracle accounts...." Read the rest (click here)

Check out the book:

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C.S. Lewis, God, and Miracles

“If we admit God, must we admit Miracle? Indeed, indeed, you have no security against it. That is the bargain.”—C.S. Lewis

If it’s even possible that God exists, then we can’t rule out his intervention in the natural world before we consider the evidence.

Did Humans Invent God?

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The Miracle of the Origin of Life

Nicholas Wade, science writer for the New York Times, summarizes the current state of affairs regarding origins of life research:

“Everything about the origin of life on earth is a mystery, and it seems the more that is known, the more acute the puzzles get…The chemistry of the first life is a nightmare to explain. No one has yet devised a plausible explanation to show how the earliest chemicals of life -- thought to be RNA, or ribonucleic acid, a close relative of DNA -- might have constructed themselves from the inorganic chemicals likely to have been around on the early earth. The spontaneous assembly of small RNA molecules on the primitive earth ''would have been a near miracle,'' two experts in the subject helpfully declared last year.”

Lest you think this is an argument from ignorance, it is from what we do know about DNA and proteins and amino acids and the early earth's atmosphere. Chance or luck is out. And there is no self-organizing principle / law that made this "necessary" in any sense of the word.

Oxford Atheist Richard Dawkins on the Origin of Life (from Expelled):

Richard Dawkins: We know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life.
Ben Stein: And what was that?
Richard Dawkins: It was the origin of the first self replicating molecule.
Ben Stein: Right, and how did that happen?
Richard Dawkins: I've told you, we don't know.
Ben Stein: So you have no idea how it started.
Richard Dawkins: No, no. Nor has anyone.

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Is Christian Faith Blind and Irrational?

On the Christian worldview, faith is not opposed to reason. It cooperates with reason. “Faith is trusting in what we have reason to believe is true.” (synonyms for faith = trust, confidence, reliance, God-confidence).

Put another way, "Faith is a readiness to act as if something were so" (cf. Dallas Willard). It is important to notice that this is the same faith we employ when we get on airplane or decide that forgiveness is really better than bitterness and Jesus was right about that.

A challenging aspect of this understanding is also that "what we we believe is what we actually act as if it were true." (ouch)

Finally, it is important to recognize that faith doesn't make anything true or false...whether airplanes are safe, forgiveness really is better than bitterness, or that Jesus rose from the grave. Sincerity doesn't make something true or false. Faith is only as good as the object in which it is placed.

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